Monthly Archives: August 2009

01.08.09: Aja and I had a good chat over breakfast about the future of Cote D’Ivoire. She says that she’s as optimistic as she can be about the elections in November – it’s as if the whole country is holding its breath until then. As for the ‘What The Hell…

02.08.09: I had a chance to charge up my batteries and check my e-mails for the first time in godknowshowlong. There was no way of progressing past Benin before the embassies opened tomorrow morning, so I was in no particular rush to get there. I decided to check out the…

03.08.09: An exceedingly frustrating day – first up, the Niger embassy was closed because it’s Independence Day over there at the moment. It’s going to be closed tomorrow as well. So I went to the Benin Direction Immigration Emigration office and tried (and failed) to get hold of this mythical…

04.08.09: Once dawn had crept up on us unawares, the driver finally took us to our destination. A bus journey to the next town and then – as there were no buses to the border, we hopped on motorbike taxis to the imaginary line that separates Benin from Burkina Faso.…

05.08.09: Frederick offered me a lift over the border on his bike, so at the cock’s call, we were hurtling towards Niger at a great rate of knots. There is a good 20km between the border guards and the border runs down the middle, so there was no bureaucratic tomfoolery…

06.08.09: After getting to the hotel, I had worked for an hour or so on getting a video speech for my mate Michelle’s wedding uploaded onto YouTube, so it was light before I got to sleep. Two hours later, I was back awake with things to see and people to…

07.08.09: At 6am, Tony kindly dropped me off at the nearby taxi rank and before too long, I was sitting under a flyover in a minibus with a guy named George because he thought it wasn’t too safe to have me mooching around Lagos in the dark under an overpass.…

08.08.09: Roland woke me up by firing up his little generator outside the hut. The lights came on and so did the telly. Wow we take electricity for granted. I got up and watched a bit of a bloody awful Nollywood film (Nollywood is the Nigerian Film Industry, the third…

09.08.09: After a couple of hours of shuteye, it was back on the case for your favourite ginger wanderer here. We left the house in search of Liberty (Yaz’s mate, not the concept) and it was POURING DOWN with rain. By the looks of things, Hugo hadn’t been driving for…

10.08.09: The train arrived at 7am in the central Cameroon town of N’Gaoundéré and, if we were VERY lucky, we could make a border hop to Chad today and get back in time to have a kip and catch the first bus south in the morning. The plan seemed sound…